Engaging and Evaluating Elementary School Students
In their first years of school, children learn the basics and in their last they learn the skills they will need for post-secondary education and the working world. But what happens in the middle?
This is no idle question. With the emotional roller coaster of puberty and the sharply rising academic demands of high school just around the corner, a positive experience in elementary school can have long-term effects for students. A study of children in this age group for Human Resources Development Canada found that it is during the period from grades 5 to 7 that some students begin to decline academically. Before that period, students have different abilities but they tend to be either consistent or show improvement from year to year. Attitudes about school and the abilities children develop in elementary school play a key part in determining their performance in the future.
These perceptions are largely founded on the realities of elementary school, says Lucie Laroche-Tétrault, a Grade 6 teacher at École de la Mosaïque in Saint-Basile-le Grand, Quebec. "Imagine what it feels like to be a struggling student," she says. "They have beat their heads up against the wall and have been reminded again and again that they aren't as good at some things as their classmates. If all we offer them is more of the same, we have failed them."
It is crucial to give students an opportunity to find out what they are gifted or talented at, adds Connie Buchanan, of White City School in White City, Saskatchewan. "First you have to help them find something that they are really good at. Then you can use that experience to motivate them to work on things they are weak at."
There is also a perennial question that must be answered for young students: "Why are we making them learn this stuff, anyway? I asked it when I was a student and I think we have to ask it of ourselves as teachers," says Hugues Émond of École Sainte-Marguerite in Magog, Quebec.
The Project Approach
For all three teachers, the best way they have found to deal with these challenges is to create projects that allow students to improve a broad range of competencies.
Émond travelled the road to projects by bicycle. "Every day I take a long bicycle ride and I often spend that time thinking about ways to improve my teaching." Revelation came to him several years ago when thinking about new manufacturing methods.
"Automobile manufacturers had begun using teams to build a number of cars on the same platform," he explains. Using this approach, each team member develops a broad range of competencies and understands how these fit into the larger picture. "I stopped thinking about ways to teach individual skills and started thinking in terms of learning environments," says Émond.
That thinking produced the Virtual Class (in french only). Émond's Grade 6 students use technology to interact, solve problems and publish finished assignments.
Buchanan transforms her classroom into a castle, a cave or the hull of a ship, stimulating learning environments for projects on subjects such as medieval times, rocks and minerals and the Titanic.
Projects create many diverse tasks for students, says Buchanan, explaining why they have such appeal for her. Many students have no idea that they are good at anything. "With a project, you can give them roles that correspond to their strengths, and this helps build their sense of purpose," she explains. "Then you can have them help others who are weaker and develop leadership skills, too."
A project also gets everyone focussed on a goal, which is a huge advantage, adds Buchanan. "Understanding how what you are doing in a classroom ties into the bigger picture is a constantly recurring problem for students," she explains. Projects help to overcome that. Buchanan's Grade 4 and 5 students have put on plays, built models and created newspapers at the end of their projects.
Having that final goal is what transforms project work into serious study, adds Laroche-Tétrault. Her Grade 6 students develop language, artistic and theatrical skills through, among others, a project about an imaginary land, The Forest of Speaking Beauty (see "An Enchanted Forest"). "When my students set out to create a puppet play about the Middle Ages, they have to do research," she explains. "And it is real research. They can't just cut and paste from existing sources because the material they collect has to be useful for their project."
"People think that in project learning, the children do what they want," continues Laroche-Tétrault. "It doesn't work like that. They have to deliver a final product."
A project also imposes a schedule and there is a certain amount of peer pressure to keep up with what other groups are doing. "Finally, there is the students' pride in being able to show these things to their parents," says Laroche-Tétrault.
To Test or not to Test?
That sense of achievement is an important aspect of project-based learning to be sure, but how does a teacher figure out whether students actually learned what they were supposed to from the project and grade their performance?
Views on the place of testing in projects sparked an emotional discussion among the 2000-2001 Prime Minister's Award recipients, and clearly distinguished the teachers who rely heavily on projects from their colleagues. While Émond, Buchanan and Laroche-Tétrault use testing in their teaching, they tend to de-emphasize its importance considerably.
Émond, for example, is convinced that the ultimate foundation of any evaluation is judgment, which must, in turn, be based on sufficient, relevant information that gives meaning to the decision. Planning, information gathering, interpretation, judgment and communication are the stages of evaluating learning for authentic pedagogical projects. He equates evaluation by teachers to a doctor taking a wide variety of factors into account to make a diagnosis. These factors may include the results of a blood test, but, ultimately, the basis for the diagnosis is the doctor's professional judgment and experience, and information obtained during previous appointments with the patient. Similarly, Émond argues, teacher evaluations are like medical diagnoses: they are based on the teacher's judgment and do not necessarily require testing.
In the group discussion, he was challenged on this by several of his fellow recipients.
"I know you are a responsible teacher," said Carmie Maclean, a Grade 6 teacher at Tusarvik School in Repulse Bay, Nunavut, explaining why she felt that some external measure of student progress is necessary. "But we both know there are other teachers who aren't so responsible." It is easy, argued Maclean, to fill a day with activities that occupy children without really teaching them anything, and without testing some teachers will succumb to this temptation.
While concurring about the need for accountability, Émond said that testing isn't the best way to achieve it. The solution is to encourage greater professionalism among teachers. There are other and better ways than testing to ensure students are learning what they are supposed to.
For example, Buchanan organizes her curriculum objectives into rubrics and tracks them throughout her projects. "The students themselves learn to evaluate their progress," she adds. "They may not understand a term such as communication skills but they know what participating and sharing ideas means. They can become quite good at evaluating their own progress and figuring out where they have to work harder."
Buchanan does use some testing in her teaching ("My students do tests so they know what one looks like.") but the bulk of her students' marks comes from the rubrics. Buchanan also ensures that there is a record of student performance that parents can track by having students keep electronic portfolios of their work and performance (see "Recording Student Progress Electronically").
The work itself tells a lot about what the students have learned, agrees Laroche-Tétrault. "What I have realized over the years is that it is the final product that matters."A well-designed project has an objective that ensures accountability because the students simply cannot produce the product without meeting the curriculum objectives.
And many of the skills taught and evaluated are pretty traditional, adds Laroche-Tétrault. "The students have to apply grammar rules and conjugate their verbs and I evaluate them on that."
Émond also uses meetings with parents and children in his evaluations. "I have the children explain to their parents exactly what they have learned and where they need to do extra work," he says. "Children get a better understanding of what evaluation really means and why it is important."
"I think as students get older, the kinds of learning that are appropriate change and testing becomes more relevant," continued Émond in response to comments from the secondary school teachers that the ability to pass tests is, in and of itself, a necessary skill. Even at the primary level, he said, there may be circumstances in which using some testing is the way to go.
Knowing when to test and when to use other measures of progress and carefully presenting these to parents is a key element of any project approach, agrees Buchanan.
A project approach also has to be properly introduced to school authorities and fellow teachers, she adds. "Others understandably want to know how this fits in with what they are doing and whether there is an expectation that they will also adopt this approach," she explains.
One of the best ways to sell the approach is to start small and demonstrate success, adds Laroche-Tétrault. That success has amazed even Laroche-Tétrault herself. "These projects have been the high point of my teaching career."
Émond, Laroche-Tétrault and Buchanan agree that it is an exciting time to be teaching at the elementary level. "There are a lot of interesting new approaches and techniques being developed right now," says Buchanan.